About Nicola López

With an anthropologist’s eye, Nicola López draws upon cartography and uses printmaking, drawing, collage, and installation to create maps of the physical and psychological experience of contemporary cityscapes. López sees these landscapes as saturated with signs of contemporary life: speed, mobility, technology. “My work incorporates these signs,” she explains, “exaggerating and reconfiguring them in order to build maps that convey the sense of wonder and vertigo that is inevitable as we face the landscape of today’s world.” López’s compositions pulse with energy, as delicately rendered, jumbled masses of chords, armatures, pipes, wires, construction fencing, beams, and concrete columns fill her works on paper, bursting off the page. Her site-specific installations, like Landscape X: Under Construction (2011) for the Guggenheim, New York, enclose viewers in an industrial dreamscape, a reference both ethereal and literal to the world outside the museum’s doors.